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Never a time when the Press reported everything without fear or favor, when it was journalists' collective mission to speak truth to power, when the news wasn't a mix of gossip and scandal mongering interrupted by "heartwarming" human interest stories and blood-curdling tales from the police blotters, when the media told us what we needed to know with all the facts and truths necessary to understanding issues and problems the country had to deal with and solve.

From the beginning the Press has conspired in perpetuating what the sadly departed and sorely missed George Carlin called the American Okee-doke, the pretty lies and comforting half-truths that our corporate overseers use to keep us in line by getting us to accept the illusion that all is well in this great Republic of ours, feeding us, as Carlin says in his last concert for HBO , "just enough bullshit to hold things together." Those lies and half-truths include the following:

Land of the Free, home of the brave; all men are created equal; Justice is blind; the Press is free; your vote counts; business is honest; the police are on your side; God is watching you; your standard of living will never decline; and everything is going to be just fine.

"It's all bullshit, folks," says Carlin, almost as his goodbye, "And it's bad for you."

Roosevelt did have the support and good wishes of a lot of the national press corps. But he was also hated and reviled in newspapers and magazines around the country. What he benefited more from was three years of Herbert Hoover, the last principled conservative President this country had and is likely to ever have, and incidentally but not coincidentally the last President born before the invention of the electric light bulb and the telephone, letting the country sink further and further into turmoil and despair while he assured us that the Market would soon fix itself and return us all to happiness and prosperity.

The people were utterly fed up with a ruling elite willing to let the nation starve or tear itself apart to protect themselves from the truth that their greed and complacency and aristocratic high-handedness had wrecked the United States.

Traitor to his class was another way of calling Franklin Roosevelt a patriot.

The Press back then was almost entirely made up of newspapermen and a few newspaperwomen, and they worked for city papers. Those newspapers weren't all great, in fact, most of them were probably rags. They weren't all devoted to truth, justice, and the American way. What they did have going for them that few papers today have is local competition. Most cities had more than one newspaper. Many cities had several, and a few had dozens. And all of them were in competition with their local rivals for readers. Local readers. People read their newspapers in those days. I think people would read them these days too if the papers would give them more worth reading but that's another post for another day. Back then you read your newspaper---or newspapers---to find out what was going on in your hometown. Newspapers had to be responsive to what their readers wanted, which meant they had to be focused on, and tied into, what was going on in their hometowns. That meant lots of local news and, because the audience, the readers, were right there to see it with their own eyes if they had a mind to, that news had to look like what people were seeing or could see if they looked out their windows or took a walk around the block or showed up at a meeting of the city council.

There were attempts to prettify it. Prejudices got flattered. Pre-conceptions were reinforced. Editorial pages were devoted to the American Okee-doke. But the job of the local papers was to deliver to their readers the news from home, and if that "news" didn't bear a relation to what the readers could see and hear for themselves those readers stopped reading.

Newspapers had to deliver the news from home, and in 1933 the news from home, from everywhere, was bad.

There was no getting around it. There was no way for an entrenched DC Media elite to prevent this news from being delivered. Unbridled capitalism had done what it had always done, devoured itself. Hooverism had shown itself to be a pathetic attempt to deny the obvious and put off the inevitable.

When Roosevelt began his first one hundred days in office, there was a nationwide consensus that bold action needed to be taken and that the people had elected FDR to take it, and the news reflected the reality behind that consensus. Much as the business elites and their minions and lackeys and apologists wanted it to be different, the news was what it was and it got through to Congressmen, Senators, bureaucrats, and pundits.

Things are different now. There is a nationwide consensus that bold action needs to be taken and that the people elected Barack Obama to take it. The local news still reflects the reality behind that consensus---for example, it's the local papers that have done more to over the last six years to bring home the fact that the war in Iraq has been a disaster, just by reporting the deaths of the local Marines and soliders killed in Ken Adelman's cakewalk. But now we have a centralized corporately controlled Media that can and often does report on a different "reality," the one in their own heads, the one that happens to justify their own complacencies, vanities, egos, prejudices, salaries, social status and privileges. That's the reality in which the war doesn't matter anymore, George W. Bush kept us safe, and the nation's economic woes didn't begin until their stock portfolios took a hit, back in September, and those woes will be cured just as soon as their own 401k's fatten up again.

Barack Obama has enjoyed relatively positive press, for a Democrat. Media types like him, or like the idea of him, and wish him well. But the Media Elite have made it clear that their continuing to like him and wish him well depends on his willingness to accept their reality. He is supposed to forget he's a Democrat, pretend he didn't mean any of that talk about "change," govern from a "center-right" position, and above all not do anything that will upset their place in the Washington social pecking order.

In short, their support for him will last as long as he is content to merely repeat the American okee-doke. If he really tries to turn those lies and half-truths into anything more than talk, he's done.

Postings on your favorite blogs will probably continue to be light and fluffy over the weekend as your favorite bloggers continue to celebrate the various holidays and nurse their hangovers. I'm not talking not talking about me. I've never had a hangover and I might have more time to write over the next few days than I've had in a month. So it won't be me whose insights you'll be missing. But plenty of others will be MIA. Fret not, however; now is your time to catch up, renew old internet acquaintanceships, and discover new and exciting daily reads.

Modest Jon Swift, the last honest conservative in America, has posted his year-end round up of the best of the best chosen by the best themselves, which is to say the gracious and generous Mr Swift has turned over his blog to an army of egoists, including yours truly, in order to let us puff our own genius. Lots of good stuff there, because we really are geniuses.

Tom forgot to mention it, because he doesn't know about it yet---Sorry about that, boss---but there are some exciting times ahead this spring for newcritics.

Wednesday Night at the Movies will return, although possibly not on Wednesday nights, as soon as we can rope in a host or hostess and he or she comes up with a topic. Suggestions much appreciated, for a topic and a patsy to do the hosting.

And sometime this spring PBS will be broadcasting the BBC's recent adaptation of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, one of my favorites. The adaptation stars Matthew Macfadyen, who played Darcy to Keira Knightley's Elizabeth in the most recent movie version of Pride & Prejudice. I expect to be blogging it episode by episode. Not live-blogging, mind you. But immediate post-game summary-style blogging. I hope to be helped out in this by the Self-Styled Siren who has just finished reading the novel and is no doubt full up to the back teeth with thoughts and insights.

There's no homework, by the way. You don't have to have read the book to join in, though it never hurts to read Dickens.

At any rate, diving into the newcritics Year in Review is a good way to good addicted to the site so you'll be there and ready for our late winter and spring spectaculars.

"These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him--at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars--his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself--such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog."--Franklin Roosevelt. Sept. 23, 1944, address to the Teamsters Union.

...the resulting tower would be twice as tall as the Empire State Building.

We're talking about something close to 20,000 books.

Steve Kuusisto and his wife Connie were in the neighborhood visiting Connie's folks for the holidays and Sunday night when I was on the phone with Steve arranging to meet him for lunch the next day I mentioned what I'd read in H.R. Brands' new biography of Franklin Roosevelt, that Roosevelt "rarely read books."

Steve was as flabbergasted by this news as Pop Mannion and I had been. He refused to believe it and he said he knew just the person to call to get the real scoop. Steve's friends with Jeff Urbin, the education specialist at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. Steve rang up Jeff and Jeff invited us out to Hyde Park to see for ourselves just how much books mattered to FDR. So yesterday afternoon, Steve and his guide dog Nira and I found ourselves standing in FDR's study admiring the floor to ceiling bookshelves packed with hundreds of books that amount to a bare fraction of all the books Roosevelt collected in his lifetime.

Jeff told us that that collection began when Roosevelt was a boy.

He always loved books.

Roosevelt founded, funded, and had a hand in the designing of the first Presidential library, his library, which is on the grounds of the family estate at Hyde Park. When the library opened in June of 1941, the Presidential library was the President's library; the whole of the collection was made up of FDR's own books, which Roosevelt himself estimated amounted to between 15,000 and 18,000 volumes.

Jeff said that for a long time the staff of the museum thought that might be a little on the high side. Roosevelt was known to embellish from time to time, Jeff said. But when a thorough inventory of the collection was finally done, it turned out that there were upwards of 20,000. That's when someone figured out, using the size of an average history book, that stacked up, FDR's books would rise twice as high as the Empire State Building.

It's extremely unlikely that even if Roosevelt was the most voracious reader to ever occupy the White House he read all those books. In fact, it may not be accurate to say that he read any of them. Brands' statement that Roosevelt rarely read books should be revised. According to Jeff, Roosevelt rarely read books cover to cover.

He was what Jeff calls a spot-reader. He dipped in and out of books as his moods or his interests or his research needs took him. In a way he treated his library as a library and the books in it, the books of poetry, the histories, the treatises, his favorites, the books about the sea and sailing ships, as reference books. He returned to favorite chapters and passages again and again. He looked things up to jog his memory or flesh out a speech or get help figuring something out.

A spot-reader of 20,000 books, Jeff was willing to bet, was better read than whole departments-ful of English professors.

Steve, by the way, is a professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa.

He did not take Jeff's bet.

There it is then. The reason I thought FDR was a voracious reader is that he was. But he was, like all lovers of books, idiosyncratic. He loved to read but he read in his own way. Which makes this a good spot to work in a comment the ever-enchanting Enchanting Juno left on Sunday night's post:

Book geeks, a category in which I place my self as well, tend to think that this quality we admire in ourselves is a indicator of something, but the truth is that there are as many kinds of readers as there are people reading books. As a generality it is as useful, and as foolish, as any other.

Reading can be a reflection of a desire for knowledge, an appreciation of language, a love of stories, a desire to look smart, a feeling of inadequacy, an intellectual shield. We can hide in books, use them, suck them dry, skim them, change ourselves, reinforce ourselves, find truth, find lies...

Back at Thanksgiving I wrote a post called A study of Presidential reading habits in which I listed the Presidents I knew had been voracious readers. Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton...

On the list I included Franklin Roosevelt.

Last night I read in the new biography of Roosevelt the blonde gave me for Christmas, Traitor to His Class, by H.R. Brands, that FDR "rarely read books other than dime mysteries."

Of course one can be a voracious reader of mystery novels. And there's nothing in what Brands writes there or in the paragraph around it that says Roosevelt wasn't a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines. But that isn't the kind of voracious reader I thought Roosevelt was or I wouldn't have listed him with those other Presidents whose reading habits ranged wider and had them devouring history, biographies, novels, poetry. Lincoln liked joke books and Kennedy read Ian Fleming, possibly with too much enthusiasm. But if all Roosevelt read was cheap whodunnits he and those other Presidents aren't the same sorts of voracious readers at all and I was wrong to throw him into the mix.

We're visiting the Old Mannion homestead and when I told Pop Mannion what Brands says about FDR's reading habits, Pop was surprised too and wondered if Brands wasn't talking specifically about Roosevelt's Presidential reading habits. Pop surmised that after he became President FDR wouldn't have had a lot of time for personal reading and what little time he had he'd have wanted to use to relax and distract himself from the cares of office.

As it happens, Pop Mannion, who is a voracious reader himself, has seven biographies of Roosevelt on his bookshelves, including the recent one by Jean Edward Smith that Pop heard Barack Obama's been reading, and I took a few of them down and searched their indexes looking for what their authors had to say about FDR's reading habits.

Couldn't find any references. I looked up---I almost typed "followed the links."---references that seemed relevant and learned or, rather, re-learned, since I'd read some of these books before, that Roosevelt was an apparently disorganized thinker, his mind leaping from idea to idea and from association to association in a way that friends and advisors had trouble following. I learned that at Harvard he was a diligent but not a brilliant student. He avoided philosophy courses because he had no patience for abstract thought. He took a number of literature classes but none seems to have made a particular impression. There's no mention of a favorite teacher or of any book that changed him. He enjoyed working for the newspaper.

I learned that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wasn't the only intellectual who thought Roosevelt was "a second-rate intellect." Liberal intellectuals, including John Maynard Keynes, came away from conversations with him decidedly unimpressed. It's a good bet, though, that part of the reason for this was that he did with them what he was in the habit of doing with everyone he dealt with in public life, disguised his thinking, refused to commit to an idea or a course of action, tried to deflect them with humor and charm, lied.

Roosevelt liked putting off decisions until the last possible moment. He enjoyed gathering facts, listening to other's opinions, which he often heard in arguments he provoked between aides and advisors. But he wasn't like Bill Clinton who liked to talk about what he was thinking and hearing on his way to making up his mind. It often appeared that he didn't think things through at all, that at a certain point he let his instincts make decisions for him, that he, shades of George W. Bush, went with his gut! Nowhere did I come across the mention of a book or even a particular article he'd read to help himself understand a problem or work out an idea behind any of his policies. I didn't find a single instance of his being seen as Barack Obama has let himself be seen, carrying around a copy of book even as a clue to what he might have been thinking or planning.

In short, even if FDR was a voracious reader of books whose titles and authors nobody around him bothered to note, he was not an intellectual in the sense that Jefferson was one. He was not academically minded like Woodrow Wilson. He was not literary like Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, or Jimmy Carter. And he wasn't a grind like Nixon and Bill Clinton.

And I never thought he was.

But where did I get the idea that he was at least as much a book-lover as Truman the auto-didact and Kennedy the would-be history professor?

I really hope it wasn't simply the case that I assumed he was because he must have been, that in my pseudo-intellectual's vanity and prejudice I simply took it for granted that because he was one of my favorite Presidents he must be like me at least in the one way I was like the rest of them, I liked to read a lot.

Is there a scene in Sunrise at Campobello in which FDR is seen reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?

Not that it matters.

However he came by his knowledge, FDR knew more about being President than all but one of the other forty-one men who held the job. And if he wasn't a voracious reader in the way I thought he was that doesn't refute the point of that Thanksgiving post of mine. In fact, it reinforces it.

What I was saying that you can't judge a President by his reading habits, and what goes for Presidents goes for everybody else, bloggers---well, one particular blogger---especially.

I wrote that I've known:

...far too many voracious readers who've apparently learned no practical life-lessons from any of the many books they've read or, at least, have never figured out how to apply those lessons...

Sound judgment and clear-headed reasoning and a habit of skeptical self-reflection do not follow inevitably from a study of the Great Books.

It's possible to read your way through all of Shakespeare and to come out the other end as big a dope as you went in, to memorize whole passages and be able to recite them on cue while you're being as ambitious as Macbeth, as jealous as Othello, as vain and foolish as Lear.

There's not much point in repeating all this, except that it gives me the chance to call your attention to a quote regular reader and commenter Mike Schilling left on that post:

You've been through all ofF. Scott Fitzgerald's booksYou're very well readIt's well known

Because something is happening hereBut you don't know what it isDo you, Mister Jones?

I was going to wait until next year until posting any more pictures from Mannionville, but Oliver Mannion is very proud of the two newest additions to his part of the village and asked that I give you a short tour. So here we are at:

Al's Gas and Garage:

And over here is Regents Family Dentist:

Welcome to town. Feel free to walk around and visit our fine shops and stores. Everything's open tonight until eight for your last minute shopping. Candlelight service at St Edward's begins at 11. Have a merry Christmas eve.

Hate to admit it, but I hadn't been paying much attention to the talk that Caroline Bouvier Kennedy might become my state's Senator.

I figured the talk was just that, talk, Media types expressing their half-wish, half-belief that politics is a 1980s style night time soap opera like Dynasty or Dallas with no more real world consequences than JR's scheming or Alexis' latest plot against Krystle. As far as I was concerned, Caroline Kennedy's name was coming up for the same reason Bill Clinton's was. They're celebrities with sexy back stories and speculation about them was an excuse to talk about the sexy back stories instead of political realities.

I thought a Kennedy might be appointed to replace Hillary Clinton when she becomes Secretary of State, but I thought that Kennedy would be Robert Kennedy Jr.

And if it wasn't him, my money would have been on someone who'd been married to a Kennedy and whose children are members of the clan, Andrew Cuomo.

I supposed that, ideally, Governor Paterson should pick one of the New York City Congresswomen who've been mentioned for the job, either Carolyn Maloney or Nydia Velazquez.

But now that it's beginning to look as though Kennedy's appointment a serious possibility, I guess as a responsible citizen and voter I need to develop an opinion.

Give me a second.

Ok. Got one.

I think it's a good idea.

But not a satisfying one.

I don't think she's the best candidate for the job. Andrew Cuomo, her cousin, the two Congresswomen from New York City, the two from Long Island, just about every New York Congressperson, the mayor of Buffalo, and probably a few State Senators are far better qualified for the job. Any one of them would probably make a better Senator, at least to start with. And choosing any one of them would make all the others really mad.

What I'm saying is that if I were Governor Paterson I think I would be extremely grateful Caroline Kennedy's offering to take the decision out of my hands.

The object here is not to pick the best person for the job. The job is to pick the best person who can hold onto the seat in the next election.

And the election after that.

The next Senator has to run in a special election in 2010 and then run again in 2012 when Clinton's term would have expired.

That would give the Republicans two quick shots at defeating the appointee, whose hold on the office would be shaky and who wouldn't have time to build up a lot of political capital and good will around the state.

And it wouldn't be just a Republican who saw an opportunity. The passed-over Congresscritters, their constituencies and the local machines that supported them, would all be out for blood and vengeance. The reason New York City has had a Republican mayor for so long is that New York City Democrats hate each other.

It's borough against borough down there.

And even within the boroughs the local machines have factions.

Republicans who might have gotten their hopes up when Clinton accepted Barack Obama's offer to make her his Secretary of State are having second thoughts at the prospect of having to take on a Kennedy.

But Caroline Kennedy is also a lot less likely to face a serious primary challenge.

Again, if I was Governor Paterson, this would be a relief, because it's not just the Senate seat that has to be defended in 2010. Paterson himself will be running, trying to get elected to the office he now holds by accident. I'd much rather run with Caroline Kennedy's name on the ballot next to mine, and I'd much rather be running with the party happy, confident, and united behind me or at least grumpily going through the motions of being all those things.

I'm talking through my hat, of course. I don't have a clue as to what's going on inside David Paterson's head. Besides thinking that the Caroline Kennedy for Senator talk was just a form of gossip-mongering, I wondered if she wasn't being used as a stalking horse. Her celebrity was useful for keeping the Media's focus off the Governor as he took his time about making up his mind and then working behind the scenes to gain support for his choice and mend fences, smooth fences, and put out fires.

For all I know, this is in fact what's going on.

Kennedy herself sure sounds like she means it though.

Probably I'm not as bothered by the dynastic dilemma as I ought to be. Republicans and their media apologists expressing disapproval are a pack of hypocrites and liars because we all know that if George W. Bush hadn't screwed everything up they'd be enthusiastically talking up his brother Jeb as the heir apparent and telling us why the dynastic thing didn't matter any more than it mattered when W. was running for President on his father's good name. But as a small d democrat of course I'm against creating, perpetuating, and rewarding an aristocracy, even a liberal one, in principle. I don't like it that Kennedy could be my Senator for the next two years just because she's a Kennedy. But as a capital D Democrat I believe that the best way to ensure small d democratic principles are represented and advanced in Washington is to send liberal Democratic Senators there to represent and advance them. That means winning elections. Caroline Kennedy appears to be a very liberal Democrat, in the tradition of her uncle Ted, and she can win.

In a truly democratic and egalitarian society, a person's family background should not be held against her, she should be judged and allowed to succeed or fail on her own merits, and that's just as true if she comes from a rich and powerful and famous family as from a poor and obscure one. I wouldn't have any complaint if Paterson appoints either Andrew Cuomo or Robert Kennedy, even though both of them are beneficiaries of political legacies. I haven't looked into everybody else's backgrounds thoroughly but it's a safe bet that some of them have benefited from family connections and old school ties. And the dynastic dilemma hasn't really been much of a problem in the history of the Republic. The Bushes have been a problem, but the Adamses, the Roosevelts, the Tafts, the Stevensons, and the Kennedys are more important for the exceptional individuals that have occasionally risen from the gene pools than for their influence as families, which for all of them have waned faster than they ever waxed.

The possibility that the son of a former Vice-President and President and grandson of a United States Senator was going to be succeeded by the wife of a former President was something to think about but it would have a real anomaly and wouldn't have been repeated. Neither Jeb Bush nor Chelsea Clinton would have become the 45th President of the United States. Go back over the list of Presidents in the 20th Century and you have a list of ten self-made men and five inheritors of family political legacies, and those five include two Democrats, three progressives, and one who was probably the greatest enemy of an American aristocracy that the country's ever had.

In the last election, the people chose the son of a single mother over the son and grandson of admirals and husband of an heiress.

What I'm saying is that while it's annoying that Caroline Kennedy would probably not be about to become a United States Senator if she'd been born a Schlossberg instead of marrying one, I think the Republic and democracy will survive a legacy appointment.

Here in New York we seem to have one our Senate seats reserved for celebrity carpetbaggers---Bobby Kennedy, James Buckley, and Hillary Clinton pretty much sent us letters from out of state announcing that they were going to do us the favor and honor of becoming our Senator, and we could thank them for it later. Caroline Kennedy is at least a more thorough-going New Yorker than they were.

My reservations about her are based more on her resume than her pedigree. She may be a Kennedy, but she's been an extremely quiet one.

It seems hypocritical to on the one hand challenge Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's qualifications and readiness to have potentially assumed the presidency if something had happened to John McCain and if, of course, their ticket had won on November 4th and then on the other, say nothing about Caroline Kennedy's dearth of real policy and political experience to assume one of the most powerful offices in the country -- even if a Senator is usually not as consequential as a President.

There's a big difference between being one of a hundred Senators and the possible Vice-President of a 72 year old President with a recent history of cancer and other health problems. Steve is aware of it, but Steve is making the comparison in order to point out something else. Note this bit: "Caroline Kennedy's dearth of real policy and political experience to assume one of the most powerful offices in the country..."

At the moment New York State is represented in two of the most powerful, persuasive, and effective liberals in the Senate. (Pause here for obligatory lament about what that says about the sorry state of liberalism.) We're not talking about replacing a Republican, whom replacing with almost any liberal Democrat would be a welcome part of a general improvement project. The next Senator will be succeeding Hillary Clinton who succeeded Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I don't want our state to give up that power and influence.

Caroline Kennedy may turn out to be a quick study and quickly turn herself into a knowledgeable and responsible Senator. But how fast can she turn herself into a tough and savvy political leader?

Kennedy has been active in many worthy causes and has demonstrated leadership and organizational skills. She has had to be political. But that doesn't necessarily mean she's been an effective politician.

Or to put it starkly, I don't think she scares people.

I've only seen her in public once, that was back in September at ServiceNation, which she helped organize. She didn't speak. She came on stage with some other VIPs and when she was introduced she looked a little embarrassed and gave a shy little wave that made me think of a mother in the PTO who has been asked to stand by the President so everybody can applaud her for the good job she did organizing the upcoming raffle. I admired her apparent modesty and desire for self-effacement and I thought, What a nice lady!

Which is what I'm imagining some other powerful Senator thinking to himself as he's ushered her out his door.

Somehow I doubt it's what other powerful Senators think about Hillary Clinton as she kicks their doors down.

_________________________

If Paterson follows the polls in making his pick, then State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo will be our next Senator. I'm kind of surprised Paterson hasn't already picked him. (So is Cuomo, according to the New York Times.) Again, I've got nothing close to inside knowlege, but if I were Paterson I'd see some compelling advantages in sending Cuomo to Washington. Cuomo would like to have his father's old job, Governor, and while I would expect he'll be willing to wait until 2014 when my second term's up, assuming I don't want a third term, he's not known for his patience and I don't know for sure how my chances are shaping up for 2010. My new budget proposal isn't making me a lot of friends. Senator Andrew Cuomo running for his own election is a much more reliable ally than Attorney General Andrew Cuomo who is very likely nursing a grudge. I'd rather not have any primary challenge from that quarter, thank you very much.

And that would clear the way for Robert Kennedy to become state AG.

No predictions here, except this: If it were up to me, whoever's our next senator will have a famous father.

I'm a firm believer that people can and will make a religion out of anything. Small and large gods are invented every day. I know a guy who's made a minor religion out of tea. Last month when I was sick I medicated myself with tea and honey. When my friend the Tea-ist heard about this he was as appalled as a priest who's discovered that the kids in the CYO had used altar wine to spike the egg nog at their Christmas party. Tea is sacred, there's a proper method of brewing it and serving it, and you imbibe every day because it's a form of prayer. You don't just stumble out to the kitchen, put the kettle on, dump hot water over a bag of Lipton you found in a box at the back of the cabinet, candy it up with some honey, and slosh it down. These things must be done delicately or you break the spell and offend the tea gods. What I'm getting at is that if all belief in God, Allah, Krishna, the Great Spirit, and Moloch was to disappear thanks to a sudden embrace of science, Science would become a religion, so the premise of Neal Stephanson's new novel, Anathem , is right up my alley.

In Anathem, Mathematics is a religion, with a priesthood, and its most devout adherents live cloistered lives in places very much like monasteries and go through their days robed and hooded, following rituals very much like monks and nuns did in medieval abbeys, except that their rituals are guided by "mathic" principles instead of theology.

Like I said, I'm down with the program. Trouble is, I'm feeling a strong sense of deja vu here in the early going. Didn't I read this book before, when it was called The Name of the Rose ?

The similarities to Umberto Eco's historical-mystery novel aren't just in the claustrophobic setting and my sense of being trapped in a tight space with a lot of characters with smelly robes and dirty feet.

What I'm afraid of is that, like The Name of the Rose, the point of Anathem is in navigating and decoding a strange, arcane, and overly-ritualized world that has deliberately made itself indicipherable to the uninitiated. In Eco's book, to solve the mystery you had to solve the setting and the characters. The clues had clues and the clues to the clues had clues. It was exhausting reading and at the end of it I didn't feel as though I'd done anything more clever than leap through intellectual hoops Eco had set up for me. In other words, I felt like a not particularly bright student who had been tricked by a professor with a wicked sense of humor into finishing a class I really had no interest in.

Anyone reading Anathem?

Please tell me that's not what Stephenson's up to. I don't like novels that require homework. Already my head's spinning from memorizing definitions and vocabulary words. If I'm going to need a calculator and graph paper to get through this, I'm dropping the course.

To put things in perspective, the universe is 14 billion years old and the Solar System is about five billion years old. Let’s be conservative and imagine that life couldn’t arise around first-generation (Pop II or Pop III) stars, since the abundance of “metals” (to an astronomer, any element heavier than hydrogen or helium) was practically nil. You need at least a second-generation star, formed in a region seeded with the important heavier elements by prior supernova explosions. But nevertheless, it’s still easy to imagine that the aliens we might eventually come into contact with come from a planet that formed life a billion or two years earlier than life began on Earth. Now, a billion years ago, we were still struggling with the whole multi-celluarity thing. So we should imagine aliens that have evolved past our current situation by an amount analogous to which we have evolved past, say, red algae.

But that's what you get when you let a theoretical physicist loose in the mulitplex. Sean Carroll's review of The Day the Earth Stood Still is posted over at Cosmic Variance. Sean thinks the movie rises to the level of "pretty good." He'd have liked it better if the filmmakers had engaged with the philosophical, moral, and scientific questions the story raises, such as what would it be like for us if we were faced with aliens who were so far ahead of us on the evolutionary ladder that they couldn't even recognize us as sentient beings.

This is an area in which science fiction, for all its vaunted imagination, is traditionally quite conservative. With some notable exceptions, we tend to assume that the forms life can take are neatly divided into “intelligent species” and “everyone else,” and we are snugly in the former category, and all intelligent species are roughly equally intelligent and it’s just a matter of time before we get our own seat in the Galactic Parliament.

But what if instead of appearing as a promising and plucky if a little backwards future allies we struck them as nothing more than an invasive form of mildew?

And if you'd like to get an idea what non-scientist critics thought of the film, Gary Farber has an extensive round-up at his place. I'll give you a hint. Very few of them would agree with Sean that The Day the Earth Stood Still rises to the level of pretty good.

Two
other stories by the Countess have been published in an e-book
anthology called Monster Mash and if you go over to The Deadly Vixens
tonight and leave a comment on the Countess' post you might win a copy
of Monster Mash.

Which reminds me, The Countess isn't the only blogger on my blog roll with happy publishing news.

The blonde has pounced on my copy of Mark Sarvas' novel, Harry, Revised
, and says she won't give it back until she's done reading it.
But she reports she's enjoying it and that she thinks Mark is an
excellent writer.

Chuck Tryon's Reinventing Cinema won't be out until July but you can pre-order from Amazon now. Chuck's blog is here.

One of the reasons I don't need any Old Sneeps to tell me that Barack Obama is not the Greatest of the Great New Wonderfuls---besides the fact that I'm a grown-up and I read the newspapers and I gave up waiting for King Arthur's return a long time ago---is that Avedon Carol's and Wev McEwan's blogs have been at the top of my daily blog reading for four years and counting and AC and Wev have both been very good about pointing it out to their readers whenever Obama wanders off the road to Progressive Utopia. Which he's done again with his decision to let the Reverend Rick "God Loves Assassins and Hates Gays" Warren deliver the invocation at the Inauguration.

You'd think a guy who wanted to be a president for all Americans, someone who wanted to be inclusive and eschew partisanship, would at least have the decency to choose someone who wasn't already a famous, political, controversial, pseudo-moderate right-wing creep to give the invocation at the inauguration, wouldn't you? Someone who wasn't a pants-on-fire bigot?...

I'm sure Obama could have found a preacher who hangs out with the Jesus of love, hope, and charity if he'd really wanted to. But instead he picked a public clown. This crap does not bring the country together.

I understand that Warren isn't going to be driving policy, that he's only leading a prayer at the inauguration (and why there is a prayer at the presidential inauguration is a whole other post), but I also know that there are, literally, thousands of other religious leaders from multiple religions and Christian denominations, who aren't anti-choice, anti-gay, and anti-science, whose presence at the inauguration wouldn't be a sharp stick in the eye to progressive women and GBTQ men, and all their allies, so it would have been really fucking nice if any one of them could have been selected for this prominent opportunity instead of Rick bloody Warren.

(Quick note to Avedon: I wish you had a cute icon like Wev's so I could have used it here. I wish I had one of my own too.)

I think Obama is going to be a good President, and not just in comparison to any Republican. But as Avedon and others have said, pace FDR, he'll be only as good as we make him be. I'll add something I said all through the primaries, something that would have been as true of Hillary as it will be of him. He'll be only as Progressive as Congress allows him to be or forces him to be, and as it looks now, if things don't change in Harry Reid's Senate, that won't be anywhere near as Progressive not just as we want him to be but as the country needs him to be.

At the moment, Barack Obama is still not actually the President, so I'm withholding judgment. Harry Reid is majority leader of the Senate and it doesn't look to me as though even when he has a real majority come January he'll have any more of a clue as to how to keep the Plantation Caucus from running things, and ruining things, than he does now.

As I said, I'm withholding judgment. I like a lot of what Obama's been announcing he plans to do for the economy and some of his Cabinet choices and picks for advisors and agency heads have been very promising. Others? Not so much. For every two steps he takes in the right direction he takes one step in the Right direction.

But one of the ways Obama reminds me of Franklin Roosevelt is that he appears to be as coolly calculating a politician as FDR was. I've never believed that all that talk of bi-partisanship and post-partisanship was anything other than a ploy to convince disenchanted Republicans and Independents that it's safe to vote Democratic. The Right's success over the last generation was partly due to their convincing voters that Democrats were the OTHERS. Get them around that idea or over it or through it and they'll find they have a more congenial home in the Democratic Party. If that's the plan, then I suspect that Obama's using Rick Warren the same way John McCain tried to use Joe the Plumber, except, of course, more subtly and more cleverly.

I'm afraid, though, he's not being too clever by half.

Wev reports that Obama and Warren are actually friends. If that's true, it's a good reason for the Obamas to have him on their Christmas card list and even inviting him to sit with the family at the Inauguration. But having Warren at the Inauguration is one thing. Asking all of us to pray along with him is quite another.

Like asking us to pray against our gay friends and family members.

Not to mention, as The Nation's Sarah Posner puts it (via Tina at the Agonist) "a slap in the face to progressive ministers toiling on the front lines of advocacy and service".

It's unlikely in the extreme that Rick Warren's "purely symbolic" selection is going to attract any non-negligible number of reactionary evangelical voters, while slapping major Democratic constituencies in the face surely carries its own risks. And worse, it elevates Warren's stature further, giving him "bipartsian" media credibility when he inevitably attacks any decent part of Obama's agenda. It's a dismaying choice, wrong on the merits and wrong on the politics.

Updated again so Scott no longer has the last word but he's a big boy and won't mind: As you've probably heard by now, Warren was definitely Obama's own choice and he's not about to back away from it. Wev has the video and a transcript.

According to Steve Benen, this will be the first Presidential inauguration that features an invocation. I'm surprised. I could swear that every one I've watched opened with a preacher and a prayer. Is an invocation something different? Something more? Also, according to Steve, this will be the first with a benediction, which must be different from a closing prayer because I'm sure that I've seen those at inaugurations in the past too. Now, while Warren will be delivering the invocation, the benediction will be given by Civil Rights legend Dr Joseph Lowery. This apparent counter-balancing act may be Obama's attempt to split the difference or look as though he is. It may be, as some of Steve's readers argue, that having Lowery wrap things up trumps having Warren doing the cold opening. But there is this: Every Right Wing Evangelical who tunes in to hear Warren is likely also going to stick around to hear, not just Lowery, but Barack Obama, who, I'm just guessing here, probably isn't going to sound all that bi-partisan or post-partisan to your average conservative. Will Lowery trump Warren? Better question. Will Obama trump Warren? The answer to this explains why various Right Wing types are as furious about Warren's invocation as we are. They're afraid it is a ploy and Obama is using Warren.

Now, the "ploy" works like this, if it works. Scott is probably right, the number of Right Wing evangelicals who can be peeled away from the Republican Party is almost certainly negligible. But the number of socially conservative, religious Republican voters who have been voting against their own economic interests and who might be brought to see that is not. The actual number of these potential converts to the Democratic Party doesn't have to be very high to tip some Congressional races. Not all Christians are Evangelicals, just as not all Evangelicals are conservatives. If these voters can be persuaded that Barack Obama is not a scary liberal-angry black dude-Muslim by the presence of Rick Warren and they start making visits to the Democrats' neighborhood, they very well might decide they like the look of things, such as guaranteed health insurance, economic policies that keep their jobs in this country, higher wages, and more stable and socially conservative communities (Remember, it's our policies that actually reduce the number of abortions and out of wedlock pregnancies and keep kids in school etc etc etc), to the point of not minding having gay couples and other hippies as their neighbors and so they stick around and become somewhat reluctant Democrats, meanwhile, their kids grow up quite contentedly as enthusiastic Democrats.

Some heartening news: Warren isn't the only one of Obama's friends who'll be a featured speaker at the Inauguration. Poet Elizabeth Alexander will be reading a poem she's writing for the occasion. Obama and Alexander go way back.

Lentil is a boy who desperately wanted to make music. Trouble was he couldn't sing. "Whenever he opened his mouth to try, only strange sounds came out." And "he couldn't even whistle because he couldn't pucker his lips." But one day he buys a harmonica and his problem is solved. He teaches himself how to play---"his favorite place to practice was the bathtub because there the tone was improved one hundred percent"---and from that day on Lentil is the most musical kid in Alto, Ohio, which comes in very handy when Colonel Carter, Alto's most famous citizen, comes home for a visit.

There's a character in the story named Old Sneep. Old Sneep is a cranky geezer who spends a lot of time alone muttering to himself about how life ain't what it oughta be. "Old Sneep didn't much like anything or anybody. He just sat on a park bench and whittled and grumbled." When he hears that the Colonel is returning and that the whole town will be turning out to welcome him with cheers, speeches, and a parade complete with a brass band, Sneep is less than amused.

Seems Sneep knew the Colonel when they were both young and he was never impressed. Sure, the Colonel is rich and he gave the town its library, a hospital, and a park, but that doesn't make him any better than anybody else, in Sneep's opinion, and folks in town are fools for treating the man as if he is.

Sneep decides Colonel Carter needs "takin' down a peg or two."

Comes the day of the Colonel's arrival and everybody turns up at the train station. The train pulls in, the Colonel appears at the door of his private car, the band leader raises his baton, and---

Slurp!

A wet sound from above.

Everybody looks up.

There's Old Sneep, sitting on a nearby rooftop, sucking on a slice of lemon.

Shlish!

The sight, and sound, of Sneep enjoying his lemon causes everybody's lips to pucker and their cheeks to contract.

"The whole band looked up at Old Sneep. The mayor gave the signal to play, but the cornetist couldn't play his cornet, the piccolo player couldn't play his piccolo, the trombone player couldn't play his trombone, and the tuba player couldn't play his tuba, because their lips were all puckered up. They couldn't play a single note! The musicians just stood there holding their instruments and looking up at Sneep sucking on the lemon. The leader looked helpless. The people were too surprised to move or say a thing. And the mayor wrung his hands and wore a look that said: 'Can't somebody do something, please!'"

Lentil and his harmonica come to the rescue.

The world is full of Old Sneeps. Not all Old Sneeps are old, not all of them are men. But they're all the same. They're all convinced that the rest of us are fools too easily carried away by the prospect of a party. The sight of other people having a good time makes them grumpy and they become determined to rain on the picnic. Of course they don't admit that this is what they're up to. What they say is that they're just telling the truth for our own good, truth they somehow grasped while the rest of us were being too silly or stupid or caught up in dreams and illusions to catch on to for ourselves.

Under the pretext of doing the rest of halfwits the favor of enlightening us morally or intellectually, they make us watch while they sit there and suck lemons.

I always thought most creationists dealt with the problem of scientific evidence that the earth is more than six or seven thousand years old, human beings weren't here first and from beginning (or at least from the first six days), and species come and go, some dying off, others evolving into new species, by dismissing all that evidence as one of those clever and cruel tests of faith a supposedly loving and concerned God keeps laying out for us like glue traps for mice. Fossils are just bait for doubters looking to get themselves sent straight to hell.

Apparently I'm not up on the latest in Intelligent Design.

But I wonder if the ID types who imagine a prehistoric world that includes Raquel Welch in a fur bikini consider the implications of humans and dinosaurs mixing and mingling in Jurassic Park.

How did Adam and Eve's grandchildren---and has there ever been an answer to the question, Who was Cain's wife? Adam and Eve had at least one other son besides Cain and Abel, Seth. Cain knew his wife and Seth knew his wife. Abel died a bachelor, I guess. Where did the wives Cain and Seth knew come from? Adam and Eve might have had daughters the writers of Genesis forgot to mention. Daughters get left out of all that so and so begat stuff everywhere else. Did Cain and Seth know their own sisters? Seth could have known one of Cain's daughters. Cousins can marry without breaking the incest taboo, but uncles and nieces? Seems to me one of them must have known a sister so the other could have known a niece. Did God suspend the rules for one generation, just to get things started? While He was at it, what about Abel the "bachelor"? Were some rules about whom it was ok to know suspended for him too? Maybe the Bible's covering up. Maybe Cain killed Abel in a homophobic panic. Abel was God's favorite of the two. What are the implications of that? And how many angels can dance on the head of a pin anyway?

Where was I?

Adam and Eve's grandchildren, Lance.

Oh, right. Thanks, friendly reader and who gave you the password to my Typepad account so you could get into this post to write that?

You did, Lance. Don't you remember? Saturday night? Under the mistletoe?

Um...sorry...I had a lot of egg nog that night and...

Sound f/x. Face being slapped. Door slamming.

Ow.

Oh well. I'll change the password when I'm done with this post. Now, as I was saying?

What was I saying?

Adam and Eve's grandchildren.

Who are you now and how did you get in here and don't tell me we met under the mistletoe too.

Ask me who I was.

All right. Who were you then?

In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.

Hold on. You're early. I'm doing my Christmas Carol post next week.

Really? I'm sorry.

That's ok.

I'll just go away now.

That's fine.

Dreadfully embarrassed and all that.

Think nothing of it.

Shall I float out the window or just clank back down the stairs?

Whichever you're more comfortable with.

I'll use the stairs.

Fine.

So long.

See ya. Hey! Wait!

Yes?

You were saying?

Adam and Eve's grandchildren.

What about them?

You were about to make a point about them.

I was?

Scroll up.

Ok. Back in a sec. How about that! I was! Thanks.

My pleasure.

See you next week.

Count on it. Get it? Count on it? I'm bound with chains made of cash boxes and ledgers? Count on it?

Good one. Now scram.

Sound f/x. Heavy boot treads on steps descending, clanking of dragged chains, ghost chuckling to himself as he remembers his count on it joke and reminds himself to repeat it to the other ghosts when he gets back to limbo.

So...Adam and Eve's grandchildren, however they came into existence. Do the ID types wonder how they survived having dinosaurs as neighbors. Even if cousins had been knowing each other like crazy in the previous generation, there still wouldn't have been that many of these grandchildren. Seems to me one pack of hungry velociraptors wander into Mesopotamia one day and it's bye-bye human race.

Really? How long would we have survived with critters like this eying us from above as potential mid-day snacks.

A flying reptile as big as a car? We'd have been to him what a very slow and stupid meadow vole is to a hawk.

Maybe after Eden it was all Peaceable Kingdom time until the Flood and Noah forgot to invite the dinosaurs onto the ark.

The blonde: Not now. We're moving to Indiana where we'll get real jobs and live like grown-ups.

Me (after five years of living in Indiana where mummies are scarce): Now can we go rob tombs and fight mummies?

The blonde: Not this year. We're moving to upstate New York where we'll start a family and continue to live like grown-ups.

Me (circa 2003 after a decade without fighting a single mummy): Let's go rob tombs and fight mummies!

The blonde: No. We're moving to the Hudson Valley where our sons will grow up big and strong and normal under the guidance of parents who do not run off at the drop of a hat to rob tombs and fight mummies but set an example by remaining quietly at home and living like grown-ups.

I'd like to think that the reason Americans have cut back on our driving---9 billion fewer miles on the collective odometer this past October compared to October 2007---is that we've gotten smarter about our driving habits and more determined to fight global warming, save the environment, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

It'd be great if we were planning and consolidating trips, car pooling, walking, riding our bikes, or taking the bus to places we used to drive to without thinking about it. If more and more of us we're choosing to live within a short hop, skip, or a jump from our jobs, the stores, a downtown or a village square. If instead of automatically heading out to the Home Depot or the Wal-Mart twelve miles away for a light bulb or a bottle of shampoo, we were paying the extra forty or fifty cents at the local hardware store or supermarket eight blocks from the house.

I'd be thrilled if what's happened is that we've realized as one what a giant pain in ass driving has become in most places, how much time we're wasting sitting in the car, how much aggravation we're causing ourselves sharing the roads with idiots, morons, drunks, and sociopaths, how frustrating it is to find a decent parking spot, how maddening it is to come back to it two minutes late and find a thirty dollar ticket on the windshield, how just plain dangerous it is to strap ourselves into these thin metal boxes and hurl ourselves down the highway in rain, sleet, snow, and ice at sixty miles an hour just to get somewhere really don't want to be.

It'd be a great leap forward, an epoch of collective enlightment rivaling the Renaissance, if we'd come to the conclusion together that nine times out of ten it's just not worth the trip and we're much happier, healthier, and richer in pocket and spirit for staying put.

How beautiful it is to dream!

Most likely the reason we've been driving less--a hundred billion miles less over the last year---is that there's no point going anywhere when we don't have the money we'd have to spend when we get there.

A lot of the driving we do is to go shopping and what's the point of shopping when we can't afford to buy?

Most of the rest of our driving is to work and fewer and fewer of us have jobs to drive to.

Gas here costs less than two dollars a gallon now, but it might as well cost five or ten or twenty if your wallet's as empty as your tank.

But maybe some good will come of this. Maybe the thrifty driving habits we're learning now will have become so ingrained that when these hard times end---and they will end---we don't even think to go back to our old, gas-guzzling, rubber-burning, pothole-producing ways.

Every now and then some cranky conservative pundit will let loose a rant in which he or she declares that what this country needs to make it a land fit for heroes and heroines to live in again is a gigantic national calamity, a war preferably, but a depression will do. (I can't recall one wishing for a series of natural disasters or a plague, but I'm sure they'd take them in a pinch.) By God, that'd shape us up in a hurry. Put steel in our souls! Teach us the meanings of thrift, hard work, and sacrifice! Wouldn't it be funny if they got their wish this time and the result of this mess is a nation of eco-friendly, bike riding, mass transit taking, urban dwelling hippies?

There's a newsletter shows up in my inbox every day. It's from a progressive blogger who supported Hillary Clinton during the primaries and Cynthia McKinney during the election and who has been more than a little reluctant to give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt on anything. The newsletter is full of useful links on a variety of subjects, but it includes a lot of links to posts highly critical of Obama by progressive bloggers who were Hillary supporters, which would be fine, except that many of these bloggers seem to be actively rooting for Obama to fail just so they can say I told you so. Today's batch of links took me to posts in which these bloggers now seem to be rooting for Obama to be up to his eyeballs in the shit with Rod Blagojevich.

And as far as I've been able to figure, the main thing they have against Barack Obama is that he was supported by other bloggers who hurt these bloggers' feelings during the primaries.

I totally understand.

A few pro-Obama bloggers got a little full of themselves during the campaign. They became smug, self-righteous, and condescending. Overly impressed with their own sense of intellectual and moral superiority, they developed a habit of arguing as if anyone who disagreed with them was a child, a dimwit, or a dissembling racist. They adopted a tone that implied, If you had any sense or any decency you'd already agree with me. I'm not saying that there weren't obnoxious pro-Clinton bloggers. I'm just saying I understand why a lot of us were infuriated by these Obama boyz, who incidentally were not all boys. One of them, who is a boy, as it happens, wrote a post in which he, responding snootily to something favorable I'd written about Hillary, called me "an otherwise intelligent blogger."

If we'd lived in the same city and met up at some bar to drink liberally around that time, he'd have been telling the nurse in the ER that he'd gotten his broken nose from "an otherwise peaceable blogger."

Nevermind. Water under the bridge. The point is that it's time to let bygones be bygones.

If we met now I'd buy him a beer.

Then when he when he turned around to look after I said, "Hey, isn't that Jennifer Aniston?" I'd spit in it.